Sandeep Kumar Rai

I grew up in Jaitpura, a small village in the Deoria district of Uttar Pradesh, India. My childhood was shaped by the rhythms of rural life — gilli-danda, cricket, pakadam-pakadaai, grazing cattle, working alongside family in the fields, and the kind of daily challenges that come with growing up in a place far remote from city, school, laboratories or universities. But that world taught me something no classroom could: how to observe carefully, how to be resourceful, and how to stay curious about why things work the way they do. The desire to understand — and the quiet determination to reach beyond what was immediately in front of me — is what eventually carried me out of the village and into science.

My early schooling happened at the school nearest to home, and my undergraduate studies in physics, chemistry, and mathematics were at Madan Mohan Malviya PG College in nearby town, Bhatpar Rani. Science, at that stage, was still textbooks and exams — I hadn’t yet seen what research actually looked like. That changed when I moved to IIT Delhi for my Master’s in Chemistry. For the first time, I stepped into a real research laboratory, saw how scientific questions get asked and answered, and encountered the world of interdisciplinary science. The distance between a farming village in eastern UP and a research lab in Delhi felt enormous — but crossing it only sharpened my appetite for asking bigger questions.

That conviction led me to the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali for my PhD, where I joined Prof. Samrat Mukhopadhyay’s lab. Here, I discovered the world of biomolecular condensates — dynamic, liquid-like assemblies of proteins and RNA that organize cellular life but, when they go wrong, drive devastating neurodegenerative diseases. Using single-molecule FRET, super-resolution microscopy, and Raman spectroscopy, I dissected how tau, prion protein, and α-synuclein commingle into pathological co-aggregates and how molecular chaperones can arrest these transitions. That work resulted in first-author papers in PNAS and Science Advances.

By the end of my PhD, I knew what I wanted next: to understand the biology of the cell surface, where organized molecular assemblies mediate everything from signaling to immune recognition. In 2024, I moved to Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School to join Ryan Flynn’s lab, where I’m now studying cell-surface RNA biology, membrane organization, and the emerging landscape of glycosaminoglycan-mediated signaling. This training has given me a second intellectual home — in glycobiology, membrane biology, and chemical biology — that I now integrate with my biophysics roots.